Information is displayed almost everywhere, such as on computer monitors, smart phones, electronic kiosks, televisions, or e-book readers—at work, at home, and in public and commercial spaces. More information is available more quickly than in the past at least because of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the mass use of electronic devices and their connectivity and portability, all of which makes for a severe and worsening situation of information overload. Despite the abundance of information available, a user often cannot quickly find just the information they want. The software and interfaces currently available which control how information is displayed and navigated are often not very helpful or as simple as the user would prefer, and the screens often display too much information for the users to digest, and their experience of finding information is often not satisfying.
Often, when people “search” for information, they attempt to do something beyond simply seeking the list of web pages or documents that relate to a particular topic (i.e., what has become synonymous with the term “search” over the last decade). They are often looking to apply some filtering to the retrieved material so that they can find and make use of the portions of the material that relate to their need or which might answer their question. Web search tools are often only part, albeit a very powerful and important part, of the solution to the overall objective of finding information.
Electronically displayed information can take many forms: documents, web pages, books, spreadsheets, lists, directories, inventories, manuals, glossaries, catalogs, FAQs, help systems, indices, tables of contents, online newspapers, blogs, user comments on online content, database search results, channel listings for a television, or content within a software application's windows, to name a few. If the displayed information is dense, or more specifically, partially “off the screen” so that the user has to use a keyboard, mouse, finger swipe, remote control, voice command or other mechanism to bring additional parts of the information into view, the user often has difficulty in finding the exact information desired. There is often too much information available to the eyes, either immediately or within a fraction of a second and therefore visual scanning, scroll bar manipulation, a basic Find command, keyboard PageUp and PageDown keys, or finger swipes are often insufficient for finding “just” the information desired. With the variety of mechanisms one currently has available for use, with various interfaces, people often get overwhelmed when they simply want to find a small amount of information.
Inadequacies may exist at the low end of the range of sizes of “starting points” in the overall process of finding information. Web and enterprise search solutions often look for relevant information resources from among millions or billions of web-based resources, and databases often provide search solutions for resources having thousands or millions of “records”. The inadequacies are often noticeable in the later steps of such web search interactions, for example, when a user wishes to find information within a single information resource (document, web page, list, index, etc.) that the user is looking at, wherein there are commonly hundreds or thousands of information elements from which the user is interested in finding a small subset.
From the point of view of the information provider, it can be difficult to determine what users are looking for or at within a resource. Therefore it can be difficult for the provider to interactively expose the most appropriate options or additional information.
There are many web and enterprise search engines which address the large scale information finding objective, locating documents (individual information resources) that may indeed have the information a user wants. But this type of “search” is often inadequate for the user's needs, and finding the needed information within the retrieved information resource (document, web page, directory, glossary, etc) is usually left either to each individual information provider to address (or ignore) as they see fit, or to the browser, document viewer, or other software tool used to display the information.
Widespread tools such as word processors and web browsers provide limited capability with their Find commands, typically allowing the user to search for a single text string, perhaps also highlighting all instances on the page. Such Find commands have various limitations. For example, they typically do not allow finding paragraphs, sentences, or list items that have both word1 and word2 or either word1 or word2, etc.
The search capabilities provided within information resources themselves are often restricted in that they may only be used on the resource for which they have been provided. For example, the search mechanism for bookmarks in a web browser usually can search for bookmarks in that browser but not files within a directory.
A widespread practice among people experienced with working with data involves making copies of information from one form and putting it into another form that has better filtering capabilities. For example, many data jockeys will extract data from web pages or other documents and insert it into a spreadsheet. Getting it into a suitable form within the spreadsheet may take considerable effort with cut-and-paste techniques, formulas, functions, and hand editing. Once the data is in a usable form in the spreadsheet, the user may take advantage of the native capability of the spreadsheet for filtering and sorting.
The search capabilities provided in many of the application-specific contexts do not provide complete Boolean logic capability or the ability to search for phrases. For example, one browser bookmark search (for example, the Firefox™ browser) provides the ability to do an AND operation using a blank as the implied operator, but not an OR, a NOT or a quoted string capability. Other browsers provide no ability to use any of the Boolean operators or a phrase search. So, if the user has, for example, several thousand bookmarks, searching with these restrictions is usually insufficient to produce the best results for the information need. Similarly, a popular spreadsheet allows only a limited number of OR operations (using a cumbersome menu interface) for filtering the spreadsheet data.
Some web pages that allow users to search for product information provide a faceted search approach that allows the user to mark in a check box various attributes of the product in a number of categories (e.g., price, size, feature, and manufacturer). Implicitly, these approaches usually restrict the search to a series of Boolean AND operations of the selected facets; sometimes a Boolean OR is available; only rarely is a Boolean NOT function allowed. In addition, the provider of the information resource may not have included facets for the specific attributes by which the user may wish to filter the resource.
Summing up some of the above inadequacies, because of the variety of mechanisms and interfaces in use, and their disparity and inadequacies, users typically do not have a simple, comprehensive, consistent method to find information within individual information resources that are too large to be easily navigated or show fully on a single electronic display.
Some solutions for the issue of the provider displaying related content, such as AdSense, are utilized to attempt to contextualize based on interpreted meaning of the content on a page. Such systems make use of natural language processing and sophisticated algorithms to glean the “sense” of what a page's content is about. Unfortunately, unless these systems are used in conjunction with eyeball and mouse tracking software, they are typically unable to determine which portion of content within a given screen has captured the user's attention, which words the user is focused on in their effort to locate what they are seeking.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an improved system and method for filtering information that overcomes drawbacks and inadequacies of known methods and systems.